The Girl wouldn’t stop crying, all the way to the hospital she kept it up. Well, you could hardly blame her. Terry remembered, from the Comer job that went wrong, what it was like to have a broken bone. The driver was watching him in the mirror, but said nothing. Terry in a state was not a person you’d want to meddle with.

At the hospital a nurse took the Girl away to have her wrist tended to, while Terry was given the third degree by a nosy doctor with silver hair, name of Cruz. Terry put on the helpless foreigner act, pretending he didn’t know what had happened exactly, since the Girl didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak Spanish. It was an accident, he said. She had tripped and fallen. He was only helping her because he felt sorry for her. Cruz was deeply suspicious. He probably knew that the place Terry had given the address of was a lupanar. But he couldn’t prove Terry had done anything, and in the end he went off, saying the Girl would be kept in ‘for observation’, and that Terry could phone later and find out how she was.

It was as easy as that.

*

And it could have been easier, for it turned out he needn’t have broken the poor little bitch’s wrist after all. In a busy hospital, no one notices you unless you’re a doctor, or look as if you’re in need of one. He walked around the place, making sure not to hurry, or to seem too relaxed. He went up in the lift, to the first and second floors, and wandered along corridors that smelled of antiseptic and cooked food. He even took a look into some of the rooms – in one, a uniformed nurse was sitting beside an old guy lying in bed, and he could have sworn she was giving him a handjob under the blankets.

All the same, he knew this wasn’t the way to find the target. She could be anywhere – she could be on her day off. He would have to go to reception and ask for her, by name. Which he did.

The nun or whatever she was behind the desk looked at him as if he had landed from Mars. She couldn’t understand what he was saying. Was she stupid, or was she putting it on? It was only a name he was saying, after all.

‘Law-less,’ he said again, speaking very slowly and struggling to keep his temper, ‘Doc-tor An-ge-la Law—’